Instinctual subtype
Enneagram sx5: who gets the hours a Five saves up
The name that came with sx5 is trust, which is funny, since the phrase your friends would reach for is trust issues. Your passwords, your plans and whatever hurts stay locked up, and the list of people with a key is shorter than any other list you keep, sometimes one line long. Below is what a Five does with everything saved up once somebody is on that line. A name alone doesn't settle whether the subtype is yours.
- leading
- second
- neglected
The code does not say which of the other two is second and which is neglected
Countertype: the passion turns back against itself
01
What this instinct guards
- spI cover my own needs first
- soI read where I stand with people
- sxI go all in on one person
From nine at night an sx5's phone sits on Do Not Disturb, and one number is allowed through. That number carries what the sexual instinct guards in general, the charge of a single pairing, and for a Five it carries a ledger entry as well: this is the one conversation booked as income rather than expense, because a Five needs to know there will be enough, and this person takes nothing out. Every other call can wait till morning.
That spring the owner of the number takes a job in Singapore, twelve hours ahead. By midnight the Five has a spreadsheet: days down the side, hours across the top, green wherever both of them are awake and off work. Four green blocks a week, every one at six in her morning. The morning she has not handed to anyone in fifteen years starts with his voice from April on.
The winter her mother is in and out of the hospital and a project is due at work, she has thirty minutes a day to spare, and they go into that same early call. He does most of the talking, about the rain off the strait and the neighbor with the saxophone. She drinks her coffee and listens, and by eight she has what it takes to drive to the hospital.
02
How it colors the passion
- The type's passion goes outward through the instinct
- Countertype: the passion turns back against itself
Given a single connection, avarice about presence, which wants nothing to leave uncounted, hoards the connection the way it would hoard hours. Three years into living with someone, the Five turns up alone at her sister's wedding; the family knows him as a name and a voice on the phone. Shame has nothing to do with it: anything shown becomes common property and can't be kept whole.
Trust runs the other way too. At nineteen a friend told her the real reason he dropped out of music school, and at his fortieth three people at the table speculate about it out loud while she keeps slicing the cake so calmly that nobody thinks to ask her. Twenty-one years on, she holds his secret the way she holds her own.
The other two Fives hand out presence in crumbs or not at all; the sexual instinct turns the whole flow toward one person. The counting goes on, only now it saves up for him. He works two-week hitches on a rig in the Gulf, and before he comes ashore she lives like someone stocking up for winter: haircut, dentist, translations in a month early. While he is home she has no work and no hours of her own, and the morning his ride pulls out she keeps the blinds down until evening: the reserve went out whole.
03
How it differs from the other two
- This page
- Countertype
sp5, castle
Both can get through a weekend without saying a word out loud and call it a good weekend. After years of renting, both finally get a place of their own. sp5 gives the new address to nobody until spring, not even his brother, and is pleased about it. sx5 has a spare set of keys cut that same afternoon and drives them across town in the evening to one person. When you finally have enough of something, money, time, quiet, what is the best part: that nobody is needed now, or that now there is something to give one person?
so5, totem
A notebook lives in a pocket for both of them, and more goes into it in a day than either says out loud in a week. Both come back from a summer on a dig in New Mexico. Within a week so5 is giving a slide talk at the county archaeological society, with an argument running late, and nobody asks what it was like out there. sx5 never opens the slides. Three nights running she tells one person what it was like alone in the trench at five in the morning, and what she figured out about herself. After a trip like that, what is harder to keep to yourself: what you found, or what happened to you out there?
04
Place in the stacking, and the neglected one
- sx/sp/so
- sx
- sp
- so
- sx/so/sp
- sx
- so
- sp
With this leading instinct, two stackings are possible
When they moved in together it was into his one-bedroom, and the Five gave up her two-bedroom along with the study, the room with her desk and two monitors. There was no discussion, only a rented truck on Saturday. Now she translates at the kitchen table after midnight while he sleeps, and a whole night yields about what a morning in the study used to.
When the leading sexual instinct has social as second, self-preservation is the neglected one, and for this Five it looks like boots with a split sole, going on the third winter. Avarice that knows exactly how many hours went to people keeps no record of wet feet: a new pair costs two hours at the mall among salespeople, and she grudges the hours more than the feet.
Where social is the neglected one and self-preservation second, avarice spends not one evening on the trade. She was the first to translate a Portuguese novelist into English, yet for his anniversary collection the publisher asks her last and misspells her name, and the prize for the new translation goes to a colleague who came to every reading. She reads about the shortlist in the paper.
05
What the test shows
Everything separated: subtype and the full stacking
Second and neglected close: subtype without the stacking
Leading and second close: two candidates
The test reports four things, and the instinct is the one we're least sure about. We'd rather tell you that than bury it. For about half the people who take it, the three instincts come out too close to call, and when that happens we show you the top two instead of picking one. For this Five the language of the passion can easily read as self-preservation in the answers: needing a lot of time alone, having to conserve energy, finding intrusions on the routine draining, which is exactly how self-preservation describes itself. The one person all that saving is for may not show up in the answers at all, since she keeps quiet about him even to a questionnaire. In that case self-preservation may come out leading, or the result may show it and the sexual instinct as two candidates.
06
Questions
Why don't I have any "sort of" friends?
Because the middle costs more than either end. With one person presence isn't counted, with everyone else the portion is set beforehand and close to zero, and either way there is nothing to decide. A medium friendship asks for a decision every time: how much to give, what to leave out, when to go. That arithmetic tires you more than the visit, so an acquaintance tips one way or the other.
Why do my closest connections happen at a distance?
Distance does for free what otherwise costs you effort: it measures out the portions. A message gets written when there is something to say and the energy to say it, and read when you are ready, and the charge holds, sometimes it climbs. Living side by side has no such meter, and presence has to be on hand in full at any minute. So years of letters can hold more closeness than the next room.
Why does a fight with the person closest to me knock me out for a week?
A conflict at work takes something that was handed out in a portion anyway, and the portion is no loss. A fight with the one person hits the place where your energy comes in instead of going out, so the income stops. Working and sleeping get hard less from hurt than from a balance that has suddenly gone negative. What helps is not distraction but finishing the conversation, even briefly.
How do I tell the person I love that I need time alone and it isn't about them?
Tell them where the time goes. Being alone takes nothing from them: it is where the store fills up that later goes to them, and without those hours there would be nothing to give. Name when and where you come back, something like "until Sunday, and the evening is ours," rather than just closing the door. Then the leaving reads as getting ready for them, not as a retreat.